It is one of the most tantalizing features of the ancient history of southern Asia that there is no generally accepted solution to the dating problems of the Kushan dynasty. The wide divergences of opinion still current with regard to this question were well evidenced by the lively discussions which took place at the Conference on the Date of Kanishka, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 20 to 22 April I960. It was rightly appreciated that numerous questions of Oriental history and archaeology depend on the correct solution of this problem.

This article is an attempt to assemble and reassess the evidence relating to the problems of land tenure in the Middle Assyrian period, and to show that all ‘private’ land was normally held as a concession from the crown in return for the performance of ilku obligations. The subjects are treated in five main sections:

1: ilku and military service (pp. 496–502)

2: the Middle Assyrian laws, tablet A, § 45 (pp. 502–8)

3: allocation of tenures by the crown (pp. 508–12).

4: evidence from the land sale documents (pp. 512–17)

5: conclusions (pp. 517–19)

Partial and complete Bible translations into classical Chinese existed well before Protestant missionaries actually began to work actively among the Chinese. Translation work accelerated once missionaries gained a foothold in the newly opened treaty ports after 1842, and the entire Bible or portions of it were translated into Fuzhou, Amoy, Canton, Hakka, Suzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai dialects. S. I. J. Schereschewsky's (1831–1906) translation of the Old Testament (OT) into the northern vernacular in 1875 opened a new chapter. His translation was accessible to larger numbers of people and, in contrast to the OT in classical Chinese, was readily understood when read to the illiterate. Moreover, unlike previous translations, it was prepared entirely from the Hebrew original.

The purpose of this essay is to examine some of Schereschewsky's views on translating and several of the techniques which he employed in rendering into Chinese the Book of Genesis. My basic assumption is that translation is an interpretative activity. When a text is transposed from one language into another, changes are introduced that are consonant with the receiving languages and culture. Translation is affected by interpretations from within the receptor tradition which, in turn, makes possible the acceptance of the translation and the ideas which it contains. Thus the Old (as well as the New) Testament translations represented one of the initial steps in the signification of Protestant Christianity.

Attaining just a glimmer of an understanding of Chinese or Japanese in the seventeenth century required prodigious feats of imagination and the abandonment of widely-held convictions about the nature of language. Progress towards a rational and sophisticated understanding was held up by persuasive but fantastical theories to which lifetimes were devoted in vain. In their very different ways both languages were subversive of contemporary notions of language, and the conceptual frameworks for adequate descriptions had to be generated from scratch. The difficulties can scarcely be overestimated: the Chinese language was vigorously attacked in 1678 as the language of the devil on the ground that its pictographic nature would occasion a breach of the Second Commandment if the name of God were written, and the following year Leibniz drew up a list of questions concerning Chinese which ask, among other things, ‘whether the Chinese language was artificially constructed, or whether it has grown and changed by usage like other languages’. Japanese attracted less interest, but the difficulty of the two languages was legendary: in 1708 the Dutch scholar Adrian Reland (1676–1718), who published numerous works on Persian, Jewish and Islamic studies, wrote of the immense numbers of characters to be learnt by anybody who wished to know Chinese or Japanese, with awe at the thought that ‘a man's life would scarcely suffice to attain perfect knowledge of one language’.

The text presented below has been transcribed from a verbal account given by the Mntwana (Princess) Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, of the Zulu Royal family. The Princess is the sister of the late Paramount Chief Solomon Maphumuzana Nkayishana, and great-aunt to the present Paramount Chief of the Zulu. Her late husband was Chief Mathole Buthelezi, and her son, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, is at present Chief Executive Councillor of the kwaZulu Government. Princess Magogo is widely acknowledged as the greatest living authority on the subject of Zulu music. As a performer, her musical repertoire is prodigious, encompassing traditional items dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and possibly earlier. Her reply, when asked how she came to learn so much of the Zulu musical repertoire, was as follows: ‘When I was a young girl, I slept in the huts of my grandmothers, the wives of King Cetshwayo, and one could not escape hearing a great deal of our traditional music’. Besides her accomplishment as a singer, the Princess is the last remaining player of the classic Zulu instrument for song-accompaniment, the ugubhu musical bow. The present discourse, on Zulu music and its role in traditional life,, provides insight of a kind that is beyond the reach of an outside observer, since the Princess has drawn on a lifetime of personal experience. To provide relevant illustrations, she frequently broke into song during her discourse. Musical transcriptions of these songs appear at the end of the present paper, in Appendix 1. The tonality of the music is briefly discussed in Appendix 2.

Sīstān (Sijistān or Sāgistān) came within the scope of British Indian frontier defence during the Napoleonic era. Lord Minto sent out missions to the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Persia in order to acquire reliable information about the borderlands. Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger in 1810 explored the route westward into Persia from Baluchistan. Christie separated from the others at Nushki and travelled to Herat via Sīstān before joining Pottinger in Iṣfahān. According to Christie: Seistan is a very small province on the banks of the Helmind, comprising not more than five hundred square miles, bounded on the north and northeast by Khorasan, on the west by Persia, and on the south and south-east it is separated from Mukran by an uninhabited desert.

Since the early ‘thirties we have found it necessary constantly and independently to review the sort of abstractions usually made in descriptive linguistics, and in making new ones to refer them to a schematic framework of levels, at each one of which some component of meaning could be handled by a system of constructs and stated.

Professor Panconcelli-Calzia seems only recently to have awakened to the idea that four-fifths of linguistics, including even experimental phonetics, is invention rather than discovery. The work of the English school of phonetics since the time of the Bells has been rich in invention, and earned the inadequate description of being “practical”. In the best sense of the word, descriptive linguistics must be practical, since its abstractions, fictions, inventions, call them what you will, are designed to handle instances of speech, spoken or written, and make statements of the meaning of what may be called typical speech events. All these fictions, whether made by machines or by direct verbal statement may perhaps be figuratively described as “asymptotic”.

If we are constantly mindful of the different levels of abstraction and the nature of the fictions set up, the inventions of kymography and palatography and the inventions of phonology or other branches of linguistics may be brought into relation and used to justify one another mutually.

The purpose of the present article is to give an illustration of the pressure of “invention” at the levels of phonology and even of general linguistic theory, which has led to ancillary “inventions” in the laboratory.

Considering the unique position of the Modern South Arabian languages within Semitic it is surprising how little has been published concerning them. A case in point is the Jibbāli language of Dhofar, whose extreme phonetic and phonological complexity should arouse the interest of the general linguist as well as of the Semitic specialist. This becomes clear in even a brief perusal of the most notable pioneer study of the language, T. M. Johnstone's Jibbali lexicon.

IN October 1948, the Governor of Hong Kong appointed a committee to consider the position of Chinese law and custom in that colony. The report of this committee, which was published in February 1953,1 will have drawn attention to the fact that the old family law of China, quite apart from the limited recognition given to it by the courts, continues to exercise considerable influence on the lives of millions of Chinese, not only in Hong Kong, but in the other British territories of South-East Asia. In China itself, as regards matters of the family, the Civil Code of the former National Government had never, over most of the country and for the mass of the people, any very eifectual force, and the customary law continued to exist in almost undiminished vigour until the establishment of the People's Government in 1949.2 Since then the situation has changed completely. New laws regarding marriage and property are effectively enforced, and have everywhere replaced the old customs and, what is still more important, an extremely efficient system of mass-education in the principles of Communism will before long have expelled from people's minds those beliefs on which the old Chinese law was based. From now on, apart from Formosa, it is only in Hong Kong and among the communities of overseas Chinese throughout South-East Asia that Chinese customary family law will continue to exist, but even with such limitations it is still of sufficient importance to make its study of practical significance.

The distinction made between the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by the writers on Sanskrit Poetics is well known. We propose in this paper to consider how far the prescriptions of the rhetoricians apply to the few existing specimens of the ākhyāyikā and the kathā by Subandhu and Bāṇa-bhaṭṭa, and what light, if any, they throw on the development of these species of prose composition in Classical Sanskrit.

John Dryden's ‘Religio laid’, a defence in rhyming couplets of English Protestantism, is not an obvious point of departure for this study of a Muslim poem about juristic authority. There is value however in the comparison for the contrasts that emerge. Dryden's poem first defends Christianity against an Enlightenment Deism, and then situates English Protestantism between the two extremes of Papism and ‘the private spirit’ (‘Occasioned by great zeal and little thought’). Ibn ‘Ābidīn's ‘Chaplets on the mufti's task’, written in the nineteenth century, is a highly condensed version of a conventional academic work of the type sometimes called ‘manuals for muftis’ or adab al-muftī. It aims to inform the professional mufti and the educated jurist of a methodology for the discovery of a rule of law. It speaks of secure authority; very different from the challenged, if triumphant, authority of English Protestantism in the seventeenth century.

Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

In the course of their expansion into Central Asia the Muslims came into contact with Turks, either settled and Iranized or else nomadic and marauding in their mode of life. As early as the time of the Caliph ‘Uthmān, when the conquest of Khurāsān was barely complete, there were, according to the historical sources, a number of incursions by Turkish nomads into that province in the neighbourhood of Marw and even as far as Nīshāpūr. Under the Umayyads, however, the Muslims came into direct contact with both the Western and the Northern Turkish states. In the period 86–96/705–15, under Qutaiba b. Muslim, the famous Umayyad governor, the Muslims won their first important victory over the Western Turks. Under Naṣr b. Sayyār, in the year 121/738–9, the Muslims broke the power of the Western Turks by defeating the dominant group amongst them, that of the TürgeshKhāqāns. The empire of the Northern Turks was destined to come to an end shortly afterwards in the year 744.

Ibn Khaldūn runs the risk of being everything or nothing—or, at least, no more than this or that. It has long been customary to separate the Muqaddima or so-called Prolegomena from the body of the Kitāb al-'Ibar or so-called Universal History, and to treat them quite differently as an essay in the philosophy of history distinct from a much more commonplace amalgam of historical information of varying value. Regarded as no more than a vast compilation of historical knowledge in the manner of the time, this great bulk of the work has received much less attention than the much more famous introduction. By concentrating on Ibn Khaldūn's later career in Egypt, Fischel dwelt on the chapters dealing with the Mamlūks and the Mongols, and with Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Judaism. Treating him as an historian of the Marinids in Morocco, Shatzmiller has located the ‘Ibar as a whole in the dynastic tradition of Fes.4 The Marinids were a self-consciously Berber dynasty whose official histories fall into the well-established category of Mafākhir al-Barbar or ‘Boasts of the Berbers’, and it might be said that Ibn Khaldūn's classification of his material according to race merely reflected the origin of his magnum opus in a familiar literary tradition, from whose constraints he was only freed by the collapse of the political order in the Maghrib in the second half of the fourteenth century.

The book which passes under the name of Ho-kuan-tzu, ‘Master of the pheasant cap’, an otherwise unknown teacher supposedly of the third century B.C., expounds a variety of syncretism which roots the fa decreed by the ruler in a Yin-Yang cosmological scheme. It is remarkable for presenting no less than three contradictory programmes for ideal government, two of them described at length and ascribed to sage emperors missing in orthodox historiography; one is roughly classifiable as Legalist, one as Yin-Yang, the third as Taoist anarchist. It attracted little attention until recently because of lack of evidence as to its date. But with the discovery in 1973 of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts of Laotzu it was noticed that the ‘Yellow Emperor’ documents attached to manuscript B are closely related to it; and Wu Kuang has since pointed out that the first two chapters observe the taboo on the personal name of the Ch'in First Emperor.

The study of Muslim lexicology concerned with the Qur'ān has a short but illustrious bibliography, the highlights of which may be summed up for the purposes of the following discussion by mentioning four people: Arthur Jeffery, whose Foreign vocabulary of the Qur'ān contains a lengthy introduction concerning various classical Muslim attempts to come to grips with the Qur'ānic lexicon; Chaim Rabin, who in his Ancient West-Arabian attempts to use a text which deals with dialect words in the Qur'ān as one of Ms sources for the reconstruction of ‘pre-literary Arabic dialects’; Lothar Kopf, who, through his articles and posthumously published dissertation extracts, exposes many of the trends and pitfalls in Arabic dictionaries, most notably those features which result from the influence of the Qur'ān; and John Wansbrough, who via his Quranic studies has treated us to his analysis of some of the early texts and has provided some very cogent and persuasive arguments concerning the motivations behind the compilation of such treatises.

This article examines the competing theories dealing with the origin of the so-called plural suffix -men in Chinese. Their internal consistency is assessed both diachronically and—in a novel approach—on the conceptual level, that is, with reference to the fundamental value of -men today. As a result, the theses favouring an autochthonous development come out on top, to the detriment of those postulating an exogenous source. -Men is in all likelihood an outcome of the grammaticalization of the notion of ‘clan’, operating on a substratum of ancient Chinese collectives.

It is a remarkable fact that of the Achehnese language, one of the most important languages of Sumatra, no grammatical description has ever appeared in print that meets minimum requirements. The only grammar extant is K. H. van Langen's Handleiding voor de beoefening der Atjehsche taal (The Hague, 1889). But notwithstanding Van Langen's laudable effort under difficult conditions, his work does not do justice to the language. There are two main objections. First, it is based on the written language. This is (or was in Van Langen's time) exclusively written in Arabic script, which clearly represents an earlier stage of the Achehnese language when certain phonemes had a different value and certain finals existed which have now been dropped. But Van Langen based even his transliteration in Latin characters on these archaic and obsolete Arabic spellings. The second objection is that the author never realized that Achehnese is an inflecting language, and treated certain personal prefixes as indicating a passive voice and a gerund instead of flexional elements of the verb. One aspect of his work is, however, still useful: the chrestomathy which forms a part of it, written in Arabic script, with a transliteration and a translation of some of the texts.

A discussion of the mathematical manuscripts of Mauretania requires an overall introduction to this almost completely unexplored literature.

Its foundations must first be established. Between the years 1978 and 1985 a project financed initially by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BRD), then by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was entrusted to Dr. Rainer Oßwald and myself by the Mauretanian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Its objective was the collection and protection of the selected Arabic manuscript literature of Mauretania.